Page 53 of Broken Arranged Mate
“My wolf?” I raise an eyebrow—I’ve never bought into the idea that our animal forms are a different version of us. When I shift, I’m still me, just in a different body.
“Yeah,” Veva agrees, twisting in her seat to look at me. “When Emin and I fight sometimes, we’ll blame the wolves. Likethe wolves are hungry,orthe wolves are just tired of changing diapers.”
“Maybe marrying Oren brought that out for you,” Kira says, shrugging. “But, even if that’s not the case, this situation is just a lot, too. It makes sense that you would be feeling a little more emotional—”
She cuts off when something appears ahead of us on the road, slowing down. It could be an armadillo, or one of the many other animals Oren warned me would be easy to hit while driving these roads at night.
But it’s not an armadillo.
It’s several shadowy figures, standing right in the center of the road. A makeshift barricade of rocks and dried cactushusks is piled between them, and Kira reluctantly brings the car to a stop.
“Call Dorian,” Kira says under her breath.
Emaline shakes her head, whispering, “Still no signal.”
“Me either,” Raegan says, checking her phone. “What do we do?”
“We can take them,” Veva says, already sitting taller in her seat, something almost eager in her expression. “There are five of us, and only three of them.”
I glance at Emaline, who looks a bit green. Veva and I might be up for fighting, and Kira has been training since marrying Dorian, but Emaline is not a fighter. When she and I were captured in Grayhide territory before Aidan and Oren killed Jerrod Blacklock and Mhairi Argent, Emaline managed to free us by talking to the other prisoners, not by launching an attack.
And I have no idea what Raegan’s fighting ability is.
As we pull closer, though, it reveals several more of them sitting around behind the blockade. All betas, none of them particularly powerful, but still outnumbering us by a considerable amount.
“Play along,” Kira whispers, as one of them approaches her window, grinning from ear to ear. She cracks it only a fraction, enough to let in sound and nothing else.
“Good evening,” the man says, peering into the car, his large, bulbous nose brushing against the glass. “Step out of the car, please, ladies.”
“We’re just passing through,” Kira says, surprisingly well composed, given the situation. I glance at Veva, whose hands areballed into fists in her lap, like she’s ready to start swinging. “We took a wrong turn.”
“Yeah, you did,” the guy laughs, his eyes shifting and catching on me in the backseat. “This is a toll road, now.”
“Toll road?” Kira glances at me, and I shake my head. There’s no way this is official—Oren wouldn’t charge tolls. And if they had implemented some sort of toll system, it wouldn’t be using a barricade of old cacti and branches.
“Pay up,” the guy says, pressing forward, and when I glance at the rearview mirror, I realize there are men surrounding the car on all sides.
“I can’t believe this is happening again,” Emaline says, her voice shaking as she digs into her pockets.
We empty our bills and change, and Kira lowers the window a little more to slide the money through. The guy stands there, taking each coin and dollar, then spreading them out in his palm and shaking his head, looking up at us with a pitying expression.
“Sorry, ladies,” he says, “it seems like you don’t have enough. We’ll have to take our payment some other way.”
Emaline screams when the guy next to her window swings a hammer toward her, shattering the glass and reaching through. Veva twists in her seat, grabbing the guy’s arm, and he yelps, trying to pull back, but she reaches forward and grabs the back of his neck.
The smell of burning skin fills the car, and Kira brings a hand to her mouth, looking green.
I’m so busy trying to pull Emaline away from the guy that I don’t see one gearing up next to my window to crack it open,and a second later, glass rains down over me, a larger shard lodging in my thigh and slicing through the flesh painfully.
“Fuck.”I turn, and when I see the goon’s face in the window, his hand reaching for the door lock, I feel something snap inside me.
All the anger and frustration from the past few months have built up enough, and now I have the perfect target on which I can take it out.
Grabbing the handle, I surprise him by pushing the door open quickly, catching him in the ribs.
“Ash, no!” Kira’s voice is high, shrill as she tries to twist against her seatbelt and keep me from leaving the car. “Don’t—”
But it’s too late—I’m already outside the car and tackling the guy to the ground. Either he has no idea how to fight, or he’s just incredible shocked by the fact that I’m fighting back, because he just stares up at me as I pull back and punch him in the face, my other hand balled in the front of his shirt to keep him where I want him.
